In today's digital society organizations depend on having ready access to their data. Data, however, can be lost in a variety of ways such as through accidental deletion, data corruption, disasters and catastrophes (e.g., fires or flooding), media failures (e.g., disk crash), computer viruses, and so forth. Thus, it is important to backup data in the event that the data needs to be restored. An organization may have an immense amount of data that is critical to the organization's operation.
A typical backup involves a number of operations including making the appropriate connections to the devices that may be involved in a backup, copying the data from the source to the backup destination, and cataloging the backup. Each of these steps requires a commitment of computing resources. During peak operating times of an organization, computing resources that could otherwise be used to service customer requests and perform other production related activities may instead be diverted to backup tasks. As a result, customers may experience long wait times, timeouts, and so forth.
Snapshots provide a very efficient mechanism for performing backups. Snapshots are instantaneous or near instantaneous copy images of volume data, capturing the data exactly as it appeared at the specific point in time when the snapshot was created. Snapshots enable users to save the volume data state, and then access the specific volume data at a later time, including after the source volume has changed.
There has been and continues to be much advancement in snapshot technologies. One example of a very fast and efficient snapshot product is XtremIO® as provided by EMC Corporation of Hopkinton Mass. XtremIO® snapshots allow for large numbers of high performance, low latency, read/writeable snapshots. A snapshot for a backup can be generated in a matter of seconds.
As discussed above, however, a snapshot is merely one piece of the overall backup process. There are many other operations involved in the backup process which can consume a significant amount of time and resources. Thus, despite the advancements in snapshot techniques for backup purposes, there still remains a need to address the other tasks involved in a backup. It would be desirable to have a backup system and technique that allows for frequent backups while also helping to ensure that computing resources are available for other tasks especially during peak operating times.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Replicator, Data Domain Boost, and XtremIO are trademarks of EMC Corporation.